Blog Comments & Posts

Hi Miriam. My father has a saying: the weekend client is the one that allows you to travel abroad once an year, but it's the everyday costumer that pays your rent. Do you think one of the ways to increase client experience is to hire people that understand the value of the "neiborhood" client (also related to local SEO)?

Hello Peter, I've come to trust Moz Blog because of the constancy of posts and utility of the analysis and tips. A short post, very straight forward suck as this one is very useful, it allow us to learn very quickly and instantly apply what we learned.

Paired with some more extensive, more strategical posts, it's all we need to keep improving our web presence. Keep on with the good job!

Man! I did a manual checking last week! I have very few links, but I'm tracking a lot of prospects websites, so it was a lot of work (almost 30 minutes to get a full check). This trick gets the job done in instants! Thanks for the tip!

Very nice article. I'm very frustrated when I see my metrics fluctuate, specially when I have a day where I lot of people access the site but the analytics can't retrieve their data (suck as time on page, for instance). Now I understand a bit more of what is happening behind the codes.

I'm still focusing on increasing organic traffic, so my path is very clear for now. Once I've reached my initial goals on content, ranks, backlinks, etc, it will be time to start to increase conversion rates. The interesting thing is that I can use the exact same structure Rand presented on this post to stablish my new goals in the future, it's pretty potent and easy to use!

Same here. I don't know the consequences. The debate is too deep for me to keep track of it, I hope someone is paying attention to it. I think we don't have a choice but to agree with it and keep ours eyes open in the future.

Great content Britney Muller. Do you have any data that could show us the power of Featured Snippets? Something like CTR or CTR improvement, or even conversion rates... I'd be nice for us to know the benefits of Featured Snippets for our websites (blog and e-commerce).

That part when you say what has do be done Annually, Semi-annually, etc is a fantastic peace of content! I am not an SEO agency, I'm a business owner, but even for me it's useful so I can schedule better what I should be doing and how often! Thanks for the content!

It's intuitive for small companies to respond to every single review since most of us want to offer the most to our limited amount of clients. However, as you grow, you need to keep in mind the time and effort that will be required to keep up with those reviews so you can set up your team and add the cost to meat that demand!

Luck me I didn't have the time to change my meta tags to the new length so now I don't need to do anything nor lost any time with this. But many people might be mad with google right now, and with a good reason!

Yes, we need to keep it simple, that's the only way possible now. It's a pity they came back to old standard, for some pages it was worth to have extra caracters to resume our content in the google search results.

Agree, there are things that are too complex! I am trying to focus on what I can do and don't lose hope when there are things I don't have the time to do or understand. We don't need to do everything, if we do 20% of the job well done, we will be ahead of 80% of our competitors (specially small and medium companies), this is what keep me going!

I started working on my link building two months ago, When I compared Moz with other tools I decided to sign up with a competitor. I'll keep tracking those new features, if they really deliver what is in this post, I might very gladly change my signature and use Moz!

If you do so, it would be very interesting for us to have access to these numbers, specialy to prioritize our link building strategy. It also would be nice if we could have the same information on our internal links, it would helps us a lot to optimize our on-page SEO.

It's a lot of work, congratulations. Results seems to be pretty good, let's see in practice how it will perform. I'll keep comparing my target sites Moz results with Ahrefs results to see how it goes from now one.

I'm very excite to see this future feature: -> Link Building Assistant: a way to quickly identify new link acquisition opportunities. Anything than can help us get new insights and opportunities to get better and new links would be wonderful.

Agree Jancy. The price is a bit to high, specially for people who have small sites or are just beginning their online journey. An even cheaper plan (less than $99/mo) could be very useful to bust the tools' users and allow Moz more money to develop better features in the future.

Nice point Estentor. It helps us even quantify how many customers are acessing our website at each individual phase of the purchase process.

On top of that (and maybe the main benefit), it attracts many customer at the beggining and middle of the process, with should at least provide us with a ton of e-mails for our e-mail marketing campaigns!

Nice Greg. I agree that SEO and organic traffic is the most valuable access to buyers. These tend to be more long term assets and are the result of planning and investment of the site owner. Low PPC costs for instance can mean that the nich of the site has low PPC overall or that the site owner has developed a very good PPC strategy, but this can be very short term, since PPC depends of day by day factors such as the budget of competitors, so it's only natural that those acess mean less to potential buyers.

This is a lot of work, but the results come at the long term. I just think that all of this without a good backlink profile to your page won't payoff, so I like to split mu efforts of onsite optimization with on going (allways ongoing) backlink building actions.

Hello Aenaos. I thought about increasing the sponsorship to organizations who have online presence and can give me links, social shares or a case study for my site, so I can spread the experience and attract other site owners who want to do the same. This should increase the return of the investment for our companies, don't you think?

Sponsorship! Nice peace of advise. I'd never thought about this before. I can already think in a couple of small events a would have the budget and the structure to sponsor and increase my long terms sales in exchange

I completely agree! Many small companies simply drop their online channel exactly because they only monitor the results and forget to track additional metrics that show you are improving, even if you sales have not spiked yet.

Nice article! I like to have a mixture of end/goal metrics (organic access, for instance) and intermediary metrics (number of impressions, for instance), so I can keep track of my incremental achievements and don't lose enthusiasm for the process!

Nice additional insights Thomas, it's true sometimes we add products to our online store in a kind of random way, without a clear path of action. It's important to know we need some structure and to complete some steps to actualy increase the product's succes rate.

Thanks for the checklist Rand! I'm adding them to my portfolio of checklists! Sometimes it might not be used right away, but in the future I'm sure it will be a huge asset to me and other site owners as well!

Hello Estentor, do you have any idea on what is the average Pagespeed score of your competitors? Any tool to helps us get them faster or do you have to research them one by one at the Page Speed Insights page?

This is a very critical peace of information. Now hosting and on page optimization, specialy at the home page but also on all images and plugins on the product page is more critical than ever to help us rank higher!

Hi Estentor, I agree with you. It's usually much more effective to engage in personal contact with the client, but sometimes people don't contact us if they get some very basic doubts so you don't get the change to help them and so you lose the sale. In those cases, a good Q&A helps big time!

Hello Pruna, thanks for this article. I really think that point 2 is critical! Adding conversion points at every step along the customer jorney is one of the most effective way to bust conversion these days. People are very easily distracted and some times you might lose the client in the middle of his journey simply because there are too many steps and the client has to do something else and simply close the website. Nice tip!

Agree Jonathan! Some large companies can easily surpass the smaller ones in terms of quantity of good content, simply because their budget allow them to hire more writers than the smaller companies. However, being smart and using every single edge we can to optimize the content impact is hard to do for every company, since you need high qualified professionals. If you can do it at your small company, you will easily match or even surpass what some big companies can do in this aspect.

Nice peace of advice Jason! I'll try to implement this retargeting mentality at my store. This should reduce costs of creating diferent posts for diferent social media and at the same time increase it's effectiveness.

I particularly don't like Instagram, I try to focus my social post at Facebook since it requires less effort on the design of the image and allow me to work faster in this aspect. However, with these nice tools presented here, I might try to increase my Instagram usage to increase my brand awareness. Thanks for the article!

True Estentor. Sometimes we are affraid that because we don't have a phisical store we cannot invest in local SEO. However, if you are near a large city, you can implement a local SEO campain to increase your organic traffic from that area, on one hand because it has a lot of potential consumers and on the other hand because your conversion rate and profitability can be much higher than usual due to low shipping cost (proximity from your storage and the client). I recommend everyone to try this strategy.

Local link building is going to be key for local SEO pages. Remember you will need to get local links for every city/state your company provides services. My suggestion is that you keep track of all your link sources so when you add a new city to your portfolio you can revisit them and try to get similar links to that new local.

Hello Casey, I'm from Brazil and here SEO is still at an infant stage compared to the US. One of the things we see the most is people trying to sell growth hacks as a one time offer that will solve your SEO problems forever. It's nice to see people in this community who are really interested in SEO in the long term and know what works and what doesn't and apply and share this knowledge with the community. Great job to you and Rand Fishkin!

Great article! There are always a lot of new growth hacks comming to surface every day. Google is aware of that and alwyas change their algorithms to prevent abuses and over utilization of those techniques. What we need to know is to figure out what works at the long term and stick to it!

This is a key piece of content! Of course you need some experience and the power to make decitions to take these insights and put them to work on your website, but for sure it helps a lot to grow organic traffic!

Hi Estentor, I also have this doubt. I read that older pages mean better ranking at google. I think this should be considered when grouping similar posts. I always try to keep the page with most traffic and consolidate the others to it. But it may also be a good Idea to keep the oldest post and update this content so we benefit from both oldness and great content. Is this be a good idea, a better practice?

I've recently did a "Merge and Purge" at my own website and the results were very good and for a very low amount of work (my site is only a couple of hundred pages long).

By redirecting low value/low access pages and/or setting them to No iIdex at the sitemap, we concentrate the link juice of our site to more relevant pages, increasing their ranking and number of organic visitors.

We also have less pages to optimize internally (H1, H2, and so on...), reducing our overall work to optimize the remaining pages in order to increasing their visibility and CTR .